Abstract

 

What is reality? The mindsets of  the modern world provide four answers to that question and oscillate between these answers: 1. The traditional Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions speak about a creator that holds the world together. He represents the fundamental reality. If He were separated only for one moment from the world, the world would disappear immediately. The world can only exist because He is maintaining and guarding it. This mindset is so fundamental that even many modern scientists cannot deviate from it.  2. René Descartes  takes into considering a second mindset, where the subject or the subjective model of thought is fundamental. Everything else is nothing but derived from it. 3. According to a third holistic mindset, the fundamental reality should consist of both, subject and object. Everything should be one. Everything should be connected with everything. 4. A fourth and very modern mindset neglects reality. We could call it instrumentalism.  According to this way of thinking, our concepts do not reflect a single reality in any one way. Our concepts have nothing to do with reality but only with information.

Buddhism refuses these four concepts of reality. Therefore it was confronted with the reproach of nihilism. If you don’t believe in a creator, nor in the laws of nature, nor in a permanent object, nor in an absolute subject, nor in both, nor in none of it, in what do you believe then? What remains that you can consider a fundamental reality? The answer is simple: it is so simple that we barely consider it being a philosophical statement: things depend on other things. This dependence is named the Middle Way that tries to avoid extreme metaphysical positions, extreme principles. In this paper I try to explain the Middle Way in Eastern and Western modes of thought. 

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